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18 Aug 2017 3:05:08pm

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Thanks for the discussion and the book, both excellent.

Further to Mr Tan's comments, I thought I would point out two other important figures in this area of Australian history, Eber Bunker & Simeon Lord.

Bunker arrived aboard the William & Anne (one of the Third Fleet transports mentioned in the program) and immediately went a-whaling off the coast. He and his fellows took the first Australian whales. During his second whaling trip out from England, he accompanied the Lady Nelson on its mission to establish a settlement at the mouth of the Derwent (once again demonstrating the economic link between whaling and colonisation). He was also related by marriage to Admiral Collingwood of the Royal Navy. His cottage can still be seen in the Rocks, in Sydney, up on the hill behind the old colonial stores (I think).

A transported felon originally, Simeon Lord became a great seal tycoon in early Sydney. Lord made his name exporting vast quantities of seal skins (which he collected from anyone and everyone) mainly to Shanghai. He partnered with Kable & Underwood for a time and financed a great many early sealing expeditions. The scale of the industry–before it caused ecological collapse–is evident in the fact that, in 1804, 107,591 seals were killed (and that’s only the official record). That Lord was one of the richest men in early Sydney shows how important this industry was to the colony in its infancy.

For anyone interested in the crucial role that sealers and whalers played as ‘unofficial settlers’ (despite being ‘rude, rough, wife-snatching men…wreckers, pirates, freebooters, slaver-divers, murderers, rum-swillers, sea-wolves, and sea-rats–ragged drunken beasts’) on both sides of Bass Strait, see James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land (2008).

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